Sunday, September 20, 2009

Ken Livingstone on Labour's future

Tomorrow's issue of the New Statesman features the former London mayor as guest editor. His leader Labour must change to survive offers some interesting ideas. Here's an extract:

"Public spending that benefits the population and aids economic recovery must be sustained through more progressive taxation and cuts to spending of no public benefit: cancelling ID cards and the Trident replacement, and reducing military spending to the same share of our economy as Germany. This last step would cover the cost of servicing the debt from the bailout.

Areas of the economy in near-total collapse, notably housebuilding, need direct state intervention to restore investment. Labour should never have maintained Thatcher's ban on local authorities building houses. And the government needs a courageous approach to climate change and the environment.

We need taxes and incentives to cut traffic pollution and congestion, tough targets to cut emissions by the whole country and the vigorous promotion of energy saving (such as home insulation)".

1 comment:

Daniel Hoffmann-Gill said...

I find the image at the top of this blog post quite disturbing.